Yeah. I’ve been trying to get the word out.

I’ve been screwing with Linux for decades, but somewhere along the line, Linux got easier and more reliable than Windows. I was as surprised as anyone. My last couple Linux installs were a cake walk.

I also like Linux more than Mac, but I’m a tinkerer at heart, and Mac’s (relative) lack of fiddly bits (customization options) has kept me from staying on it long.

That’s a great point. A nice Debian LTS release could be just the thing.

Yeah. I think you can’t go wrong with either Debian or Fedora with Gnome. I would pick whichever I’m most comfortable with. The grandparents will probably never notice.

I love to give Gnome crap for being a large install, but I’ve lost count of the number of machines that I’ve put Gnome on and had it just work. And I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve searched for a fancy command line way to fix an annoyance in Gnome, and discovered there’s just a simple toggle in settings for what I want.

Focus steal prevention is the feature I miss desperately when I’m forced to interact with a non-Linux window manager.

I feel the rage of Walter from the Big Kebowski each time an app randomly pulls focus because it fucking feels like it.

It’s just bassic civilized behavior to leave my cursor where I put it.

I miss the Sync software for my Palm Pilot. I also miss my Palm Pilot, anyway, as well, though.

Are you aware of the dedicated Surface Linux Kernel?

I haven’t encountered any Bluetooth issues on my Surface, but I also barely ever use Bluetooth, so I may have simply not noticed.

Lol. Well good guess.

I’m not a primary source or anything, of course. Your comment just matches something I heard once in office gossip.

Suoer-computing is a pain-in-the-ass, so my guess is some combination of SUSE picking up top talent that left other Linux vendors as IBM has been purchasing them, and SUSE just being willing to put in the extra work for the added brand recognition.

Yeah. Thankfully, Windows server cleaned up that stupidity starting around 2006 and finished in around 2018.

Which all sounds fine until we meditate on the history that basically all other server operating systems have had efficient remote administration solutions since before 1995 (reasonable solutions existed before SSH, even).

Windows was over 20 years late to adopt non-grapgical low latency (aka sane) options for remote administration.

I think it’s a big part of the reason Windows doesn’t appear much on this chart.

Heh. I don’t think that number was ever official, but I heard it as well.

Heh. I don’t think that number was ever official, but I heard it as well.

That’s certainly a big part of it. When one needs to buy a metric crap load of CPUs, one tends to shop outside the popular defaults.

Another big reason, historically, is that Supercomputers didn’t typically have any kind of non-command-line way to interact with them, and Windows needed it.

Until PowerShell and Windows 8, there were still substantial configuration options in Windows that were 100% managed by graphical packages. They could be changed by direct file edits and registry editing, but it added a lot of risk. All of the “did I make a mistake” tools were graphical and so unavailable from command line.

So any version of Windows stripped down enough to run on any super-computer cluster was going to be missing a lot of features, until around 2006.

Since Linux and Unix started as command line operating systems, both already had plenty fully featured options for Supercomputing.

Where did you find that azure runs on linux?

I dont know of anywhere that Microsoft confirms, officially, that Azure, itself, is largely running on Linux. They share stats about what workloads others are running on it, but not, to my knowledge, about what it is composed of.

I suppose that would be an oversimplification, anyway.

But that Azure itself is running mostly on Linux is an open secret among folks who spend time chatting with engineers who have worked on the framework of the Azure cloud.

When I have chatted with them, Azure cloud engineers have displayed huge amouts of Linux experience while they sometimes needed to “phone a friend” to answer Windows server edition questions.

For a variety of reasons related to how much longer people have been scaling Linux clusters, than Windows servers, this isn’t particularly shocking.

Edit: To confirm what others have mentioned, inferring from chatting with MS staff suggests, more specifically, that Azure, itself, is mostly Linux OS running on a Hyper-V virtualization later.

But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?

Oh yes! To be clear - trying to put any version of Windows on a super-computer is every bit as insane as you might imagine. By what I heard in the rumor mill, it went every bit as badly as anyone might have guessed.

But I like to root for an underdog, and it was neat to hear about Microsoft engineers trying to take the Windows kernel somewhere it had no rational excuse to run (at the time - and I wonder if they had internal beta versions of stuff that Windows ships standard now, like SSH…), perhaps by sheer force of will and hard work.

I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers.

Great question. My guess is not terribly different.

“Top 500 Supercomputers” is arguably a self-referential term. I’ve seen the term “super-computer” defined whether it was among the 500 fastest computer in the world, on the day it went live.

As new super-computers come online, workloads from older ones tend to migrate to the new ones.

So my impression is there usually aren’t a huge number of currently operating supercomputers outside of the top 500.

When a super-computer falls toward the bottom of the top 500, there’s a good chance it is getting turned off soon.

That said, I’m referring here only to the super-computers that spend a lot of time advertising their existence.

I suspect there’s a decent number out there today that prefer not to be listed. But I have no reason to think those don’t also run Linux.

but it did not stick.

Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was… not.

I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.

But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.

The first thing I do to, if I need to get the size down, is swap out Gnome for one of the X11 Windows managers, usually XFCE.

I usually do this by starting from the minimal install and building up, as schizo already suggested.

That said, I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Linux Mint is an easy way to get Debian’s core with the XFCE window manager.

Looks like Mint starts at 3GB - 8GB, depending on options chosen?

Disclaimer: It’s honestly been awhile since I really paid attention to my own Linux install size, as long as it’s below 40GB.

the live disk won’t find my Wifi

Oof.

In case it helps: I have solved that problem for myself using a $9.00 USB Wifi dongle.

For whatever reason (other contributors facing the same issue?), I have found that every cheapo USB Wifi dongle I have tried has worked perfectly with the minimal Linux images.

I realize I might have just gotten really lucky a bunch of times, but it could be worth a try.

This is great stuff.

My comment from the peanut gallery today is just that there’s no law that CI/CD can’t be kept under control and run in ten seconds.

Given the choice between a slow out of control CI/CD mess, or a shell script, I too will take the shell script every time.

But I am living my best life today, and have a simple shell script in my CI/CD pipeline.

Ubuntu was a big part of my path to full time Linux use. I adore everyone who has contributed to Ubuntu.

But also, Snaps are bullshit, and are why I replaced all my Ubuntu installs with Debian.

Canonical doesn’t get to pretend to be surprised by the backlash for pushing an unnecessary closed proprietary platform on their freedom seeking users.

I still adore everyone at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community, for all they’ve done for the Linux community. Y’all still rock. Thanks!